


am i fine on my own?

by orphan_account



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M, writer!magnus au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 03:32:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "When Izzy arrived from work, he found his big brother smiling while staring at a piece of paper. When she asked him what he was reading, he gave it to her. She read it, and it made her smile, too; not as widely as Alec, though. She finished, and told him, “Don’t think this excuses you.”The paper also fell on Jace’s hands. However, his reaction was slightly different. He chose to say to his brother, “Please tell me you’re dating the guy that wrote this.”"an AU in which Magnus is a writer that constantly shows up at a restaurant where Alec works at. inspired bythis edit.





	am i fine on my own?

Alec still remembered the first time they’d met. It had been, precisely, on his first day working at that restaurant.

He still remembered how awful that first day had been. The noisiness. Nothing would ever be quiet, there was always _something_ making sounds: chairs scratching the floor, people talking enthusiastically over lunch, laughing at the top of their voices, the door opening or closing. And for someone like Alec, who surrounded himself with silence, who didn’t talk unless it was absolutely necessary, it was… hard. More than that. It was torture. He remembered thinking in despair, how am I ever gonna cope with this? Ironically, now he couldn’t cope _without_ it. (He had to sleep with the radio on now. And that had caused Isabelle to pronounce a five-minute-long speech on how he was _so_ inconsiderate with the rest of the people living with him.)

He still remembered how that man had walked through the door (at what, four in the afternoon?), as if that restaurant were his own place, as if his ears automatically blocked all the noise that was making Alec go insane, and just sat gracefully at a table. He’d pulled a notebook and a pen out of the bag he’d been carrying and just started writing. Ironically, he didn’t remember what his first impression of him had been. Perhaps an, “Oh, he’s beautiful”? What he _did_ remember was that he’d approached his table and said in a hoarse voice, “Good afternoon.” (He didn’t know what he was looking like exactly, but with not much imagination, he could figure. Basically, like trash. Messy hair, 6-inch long dark circles under his eyes and a nonexistent smile.)

The guy had a pretty much existent (and beautiful) smile. “You’re not Lydia,” he wasn’t asking. “First day…?” It took him perhaps a full minute to realize that the guy was making a gap for him to fill in with his name. “Uh, yeah. I’m Alec.” He raised an eyebrow, which caused Alec to explain, “Short for Alexander.”

“Can you get me a cup of dark coffee, Alexander?”

He didn’t have anything against people calling him ‘Alexander’. It was his name, after all. It was just that nobody called him that, not even his mother when she was upset; in those occasions, she’d prefer calling him ‘Alec’ with a lot of emphasis on the ‘c’ sound. Nobody called him that and now his own name had a weird feeling; he knew that name referred to him, but at the same time, it didn’t feel completely _his_.

“You don’t want… anything to eat with that?”

He’d vivaciously shook his head. “No. Lydia will insist that you do, but don’t listen to her. She thinks I’m underfed, but it’s just that eating something with coffee ruins the taste.” Alec wasn’t sure if the guy had winked at him or it was just the way his eyes enclosed a little while he was talking.

           

He was a man of habit, Alec would later find out. He’d show every day at the same time, with the same notebook and the same pen and sit at the same table, where he ordered the same: dark coffee and nothing to eat. (How could he spend that much money in coffee?) He didn’t know if he always wrote the same thing, though, but he did so with pointy and neat handwriting. And Alec couldn’t help but feel curious. What was he writing? Would it be way too invasive to ask? Why did he choose to write in the restaurant instead of just doing so at his place? That, he knew how invasive it’d be to ask.

There was also the fact that, even if they did saw each other day after day, he still didn’t know the writer’s name, and it would be, at the very least, _weird_ to ask him to show him what he was working on without even knowing what he was called. (In his head, he was The Writer. He wasn’t the only one, obviously, but he’d normally call writers by their names, and he didn’t know this one’s.) He had to content himself with watching him smile at his own work sometimes, or, on the contrary, shaking his head and crossing out full paragraphs in disgust. He noticed that he wore an ear cuff and many, many rings. Occasionally, black nail polish.

They started to develop this unusual relationship, where they didn’t actually talk, but instead threw casual bits of conversation when Alec went to take The Writer his coffee. Once, he’d told Alec about this lady that had gotten angry at him in the subway, or about what he called The Notebook Problem (basically, buying way too many notebooks just because they’re cute, without knowing what exactly you’re gonna use them for). They’d also talked about The Writer’s mom (a father was never mentioned, and Alec didn’t push it), about Alec’s own parents, even about what their favorite books were. Alec found himself unconsciously (or very consciously) looking for the guy’s approval, for him to _like_ Alec, to enjoy his brief company as much as the waiter enjoyed his. One day, before thinking about he was saying, the words “My siblings are desperate to set me up with someone and nothing I do will make them stop” came out of Alec’s mouth.

It had happened that very morning, in fact. Jace --who was surprisingly good at it—was making breakfast, while Alec and Izzy were sitting at the kitchen table. “I gave your number to Mark from work, so expect a phone call,” she’d say, and excitement had mixed in a tone that tried and failed to be causal. Alec had answered, “You don’t have to do that” at the same time Jace’d protested, “ _I_ was the one supposed to set him up with people from work!”

Alec had stared at his siblings with discontent and a little bit of confusion. “Really?” was everything he could say. “You don’t have to do that,” he repeated, “I’m fine on my own.”

“We just want you to be happy, big brother,” his sister had told him as if trying to justify her wrongdoing. And Alec was happy, he really was. He was a happy person that, as he’d later explain to both of them, happened to be single.

“Oh,” had been The Writer’s first reaction. Alec raised his eyebrows. “If you’re single, what’s left for us, mortals?” he’d then say, more to himself than to the waiter.

“What?” was everything that could come out of Alec’s lips. He felt warmness in his cheeks.

“I mean, it’s just—surprising that you, of all people, would have trouble dating. You don’t imagine Paris, or Adonis, having trouble dating.”

“I-I’m not having trouble dating.”

“Then why would your siblings be desperate, Alexander?” he spoke calmly. There was no hint of accusation in his voice, just pure curiosity.

“Because—I—They— I don’t know, really.”

But he did know. It was because the only guy Alec had ever kissed was this insignificant guy in high school. (They hadn’t even dated. Sometimes it was easier to ignore than others.) But he didn’t want to explain that to The Writer, because he’d already disappointed him by implicating that he was having trouble dating. (He’d compared him to Adonis, for the love of God.) Alec shrugged and went to serve other people.

That same afternoon, when The Writer called him to pay for his coffee, he gave him a sheet of paper that had been carefully ripped off his notebook and was full of pointy words. “I figured you could give this to your siblings. So they stop annoying you, I mean.” He smiled, and Alec read the title. It stated, ‘ _Am I fine on my own?_ By Magnus Bane.’

“Your name is Magnus?” (How stupid it had sound. Obviously that was his name, unless he’d chosen to sign with a pseudonym, which Alec was almost sure he hadn’t.)

“Yeah. Short for Magnus.” It took him a full second to realize that he was joking, and laughed.

That night, when he returned to the apartment he shared with his siblings, he didn’t let them read the paper right away. He had to make sure its content actually favored his cause first. And it did. Oh, it did.

It was full of interesting things Alec thought but never could quite put in words. Which isn’t surprising, considering he struggled to make sentences on a daily basis. “It’s been two years since my last relationship ended,” was how it began, and it made Alec’s chest feel slightly warm, as if he wasn’t completely alone, “and I found out that being fine on your own isn’t different from being fine while being in a relationship. A million times did I have to fill uncomfortable silences following a ‘Well, but there’s always _someone_ around, isn't there?’ with a ‘No, I’m not seeing anyone’, and quickly adding, ‘But I’m fine.’ I had to explain to a friend that the reason I didn’t want to be with him wasn’t because I was seeing someone else, but because I simply wanted to be on my own.” And it didn’t end there, it was actually a seven-paragraph long piece that made Alec smile again and again, finishing with an “I proposed myself to stop giving people explanations about my love life. I’m single. And being happy doesn’t depend on that.”

When Izzy arrived from work, he found his big brother smiling while staring at a piece of paper. When she asked him what he was reading, he gave it to her. She read it, and it made her smile, too; not as widely as Alec, though. She finished, and told him, “Don’t think this excuses you.”

The paper also fell on Jace’s hands. However, his reaction was slightly different. He chose to say to his brother, “Please tell me you’re dating the guy that wrote this.”

Alec just stared silently at his dinner. “Uh, no, he’s just a guy that drinks coffee at the restaurant I work at.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive, though.”

“I guess not.”

“Then, what’s stopping you?”

And with every sarcastic bone that he possibly possessed, Alec replied, “Uh, I don’t know, perhaps the fact that I don’t know the guy?”

“Oh,” this was Isabelle’s voice, “you don’t? But you somehow managed to get in a conversation where you told him you’re not seeing anyone and that Jace and I want to set you up with someone? That caused him to write this and give it to you? And expect us to believe that? I see.”

“I _don’t know_ the guy, Izzy. I just found out his name, I’m serious.”

“And now you’re in perfect conditions to ask him out on a date!”

“Izzy, he—”

She pointed him with a slender finger, which immediately caused him to shut up. “You notice what you’re doing?” Alec raised his eyebrows. “You’re making up excuses. You never, not once, told me you’re not asking him on a date because you don’t want to. Tell me you don’t want to and I’ll stop.”

Alec stayed silent.

           

He didn’t have to go to work the next day, but he still showed up at the restaurant, at around four o’clock. He looked for The Writer at his usual table, and he found him. He took a deep breath and, almost with a dreamy feeling, he approached him. He breathed out, “Hi.”

Magnus smiled at the sight of him. “So? Did it work?” was what he asked. Alec nodded. “Yeah. Kind of. Uh… Actually, what I was… I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh. I wanted to ask you something, too. What a… connection?”

They stared at each other in silence, asking themselves who was supposed to go first. Finally, Magnus did. “Would you like to go out to have drinks, sometime?” Alec smiled with relief. “Yeah. Yeah, when?”

“What about right now?”

“Right now sounds great.”

That was how he’d ended up at Magnus’s place. It was neither big nor small, and it had a warm feeling to it. In the living room, there was a big bookshelf that occupied a lot of space, and that you simply couldn’t not notice. And Alec suddenly remembered someone (Isabelle, perhaps? Or Lydia?) had once told him, “If you go to someone’s place and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” That thought made him smile.

The place was awfully silent, though. Silence made him uncomfortable. It clogged up his ears and it made his chest become full of a feeling that told him something terrible could happen at any second. (And it was true, in fact. But silence didn’t have anything to do with that.) So he called, “Uh, Magnus? You mind if I turn the radio on?” To which he replied, “Yeah. I mean, no,” he corrected himself, and made little hand gestures as if he was rewriting a sentence on paper. “No, I don’t mind. That means, go ahead.”

He just put a program without actually caring about which one it was, who were the people talking and even less about what they were talking about. “That’s what working at a noisy place does to you,” he heard Magnus’s voice. “You either unconsciously block the noise or you crave it, right?”

“What type are you?” Alec asked. He explained, “You write at the restaurant, so you must be one of those.”

Magnus tilted his head a little, as in, _you’re right._ “I’m definitely the craving type.”


End file.
